Apartment of Sudafed Case Victim’s Spouse Searched : Poisonings: A woman who took a capsule tainted with cyanide is recovering. Ten FBI agents were seen entering her estranged husband’s residence.

Plainclothes officers Tuesday conducted a search of an apartment here of the husband of a woman who nearly died after ingesting a Sudafed capsule laced with cyanide.

A spokesman for the FBI in Seattle, 60 miles north of here, declined to confirm that federal agents were attempting to collect evidence in the modest apartment rented by Joe Meling, 29, whose wife, Jennifer Meling, 28, ingested a tainted Sudafed 12-Hour capsule Feb. 2 but survived.

But 10 FBI agents were observed entering Meling’s apartment late Tuesday afternoon with walkie-talkies, vacuum cleaners and armloads of equipment.

An investigator at the scene said that Meling, who was home at the time, was not taken into custody. Reached by telephone later, Meling declined comment.

Jennifer Meling, who lapsed into a cyanide-induced coma but eventually recovered after having her stomach pumped, is recuperating at her parents’ home in Vancouver, Wash. She was one of three people poisoned in what is believed to be a series of random Sudafed tamperings in the Tacoma-Olympia region of western Washington state. The other two died.

A week ago, she filed a divorce petition against her husband, who works as an adviser and salesman for Prudential Insurance Co., according to her attorney, Joseph Lynch.

“She filed on the basis of a generic statment that the marriage was irretrievably broken,” Lynch said.

In an earlier interview, Tumwater Police Chief H.M. (Mike) Vandiver said that law enforcement authorities in recent weeks have interviewed “a lot of people in association with this case and Joe Meling is one of them.”

He also suggested a possible connection between the deaths of two people and the near death of Meling’s wife to the publication of an article in the February issue of Reader’s Digest about a tampering case in 1986 with “very strong parallels.”

In that case, two people from the Seattle suburb of Auburn died after taking capsules of extra-strength Excedrin laced with cyanide. Auburn resident Stella Nickell, 48, was found guilty in 1988 of causing death by drug tampering and sentenced to 90 years in prison.

Nickell’s victims included her husband, Bruce, a 52-year-old state maintenance worker, and Susan Snow, a 40-year-old bank manager and mother of two.

Federal prosecutors argued in court that Nickell poisoned her husband to collect $176,000 in life insurance benefits. She placed bottles of tainted pain capsules on local store shelves to make it appear that a random killer was at work, prosecutors said.

In the current Sudafed cases, packages associated with tampering had been traced to six different stores located near or just off major intersections of a 25-mile stretch of Interstate 5 between Tacoma on the north and Tumwater on the south.

In addition to the Meling case, Kathleen Daneker, 40, of Tacoma, died Feb. 11 after taking a Sudafed capsule. Stan McWhorter, 44, of Lacey, died Feb. 18.

In apparently unrelated cases, a 30-year-old resident of Everett, about 30 miles north of Seattle, was determined to have died of a lethal dose of cyanide on Monday. Investigators are trying to ascertain whether Jack Durham’s death was homicide, suicide or an accident.

In another possibly unrelated case, a woman in Hawaii became ill after taking a Sudafed capsule, FBI officials said.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration agents have examined more than 200,000 Sudafed 12-Hour capsules since a nationwide recall of the over-the-counter cold remedy was launched March 3.

Thus far, highly toxic sodium cyanide has been found in three altered capsules pulled from store shelves in western Washington state.

FBI officials have yet to determine the concentration and origin of the cyanide found in the capsules.

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.